Today, digital information may be stored in various forms requiring various techniques to access and transfer the information. Depending on the type of data source, digital data may be stored within databases, flat files, spreadsheets, applications, or even data streams. Also, these different types of data sources may have different storage formats and different structures. For example, a relational database has a different structure than a hierarchical database. Furthermore, the data may be encoded differently depending on the data source. For example, one source may use ASCII while another uses binary coded decimal (BCD). In order to access information from these various data sources, it has generally been necessary to employ multiple applications to search the various data sources for the desired information.
Recently, however, data marts and warehouses have been developed that automatically and efficiently gather information, usually from multiple databases, into a commonly available database. More specifically, a data mart is a repository of data collected from various data sources that is designed to serve a particular group for a particular purpose. The data may be derived from one or more databases within an enterprise, a data warehouse, or some other specialized data source. A data warehouse is generally considered a central aggregation of data, i.e., a database, although it may be distributed physically. Data marts and warehouses essentially store information in a common format and location to enable an application to access the data conveniently.